Monday, April 20, 2020

Two privation theories

The privation theory of evil says that:

  • If E is an evil, then E is a lack of a due good.

Here is a quick counterexample: Brutus's murder of Caesar. A murder is an evil but it is not a lack of a due good. It causes a lack of a due good (life) and it is caused by a lack of a due good (the virtue of justice), but the murder is not itself a lack of a due good. For a part of Brutus's murder of Caesar is the stabbing motion of his arm. But a lack is not the sort of thing that can have a stabbing motion as a part of it!

But there is a closely related theory that is not subject to the murder counterexample. We might call it the privation theory of evilmaking:

  • If E is an evil, then E either is a lack of a due good or E is made evil by the lack of a due good.

Now, murder is not so clearly a counterexample. An act of murder is an act of killing, but plausibly what makes this act of killing be an evil is a lack of justice.

I am now suspecting that some people who have taken themselves to be upholding the privation theory of evil have in fact been upholding the privation theory of evilmaking.

But it is worth noting that the privation theory of evilmaking doesn’t accomplish everything Augustine needs from his privation theory. What Augustine needs to do is to save the idea that God doesn’t create evils. But if E is not itself a lack but is something that exists and is made evil by a lack, and God creates everything that exists other than God, then it follows that God creates an evil.

3 comments:

Brian Cutter said...

This is a neat point. Just a quick thought: Suppose we say that the facts about evil are most perspicuously captured in terms of a sentential operator, "It is an evil that p" (instead of a a predicate, "x is an evil"). And suppose we hold that the facts about God's creative activity are most perspicuously captured with statements of the form "God causes the state of affairs that P," where P always corresponds to some positive state of affairs (roughly, a state of affairs consisting of substances having positive properties or standing in positive relations). Within this framework, we might express the idea that evil is a privation by saying something like this: If it is an evil that P, then the state of affairs that P is not a positive state of affairs (we might add: it also isn't fully grounded in any positive states of affairs). And we might capture the Augustinian idea that God doesn't create evil by saying: If God causes the state of affairs that P, then it is not an evil that P.

Alexander R Pruss said...

I think that's a variant of the evilmaking theory on which independent reason is given why it is that only goods need to be created.

Alexander R Pruss said...

I was scooped: Aquinas makes the point in this post in the first article of the De Malo.